


fall guy

by muined



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cigarettes, Easter, Getting Together, M/M, Pining, Semi-Epistolary, typewriters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 08:57:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17220860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: A lesson in effective puppeteering.





	fall guy

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the thing about colonels Cathcart and Korn, primary antagonists of Joseph Heller’s _Catch-22_ : I believe that they are in love, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
> 
> Also: Korn uses two French phrases in the novel, “Where’s your _‘sprit de corps_?” (to Yossarian in Chapter 40) and “ _Mais c’est la guerre_ ” (to Dunbar in Chapter 29). If this is flimsy evidence with which to posit that Korn speaks French, well, then, sue me.

**Early February, 1944**

Mid-morning: bright, cloudless and cold. Korn stood atop a low rocky outcropping at the outskirts of the base, a promontory that overlooked a runway and the choppy sea beyond. The landscape around was dyed a winter-bleak khaki, save some purplish sage on the bluffs. Korn watched as the plane from the mainland descended, landed and deposited the man who was to be the base’s new group commander. Even from a distance, Korn could see that—what was it, Cathcart?—Cathcart was enormous, over six feet tall and assembled like an icebox. He clambered out of the cabin and accepted his one duffel bag, stumbling backward a few paces. Over the wide shoulders of his formal gabardine wool uniform he had draped empty-sleeved a long beige camel-hair overcoat, in, Korn surmised, a dual attempt to acknowledge the climate (relatively temperate, even in winter) and to look rakish. Cathcart was, however, unused to the fashion and continually tugged at the collar as he made his way up the rise, to prevent the coat from slipping off. Korn ticked a box in his mental ledger of qualities sought. Vanity: promising.

The previous group commander, Nevers, had been elderly and egalitarian, a former flight engineer who had attempted continually to connect with the men, often by flying with them; this had been his downfall. Korn had not killed Nevers. Sure, he had encouraged Nevers to sign on to riskier runs, like the pass over Arezzo that had finally done the colonel in. But that hadn’t been planned in advance; that wasn’t Korn’s style. It couldn’t have been helped. Things had grown so tedious. The old man’s career had reached its natural terminus, as would the war in an additional year or two. Nevers even in life had been a dead end, under whom Korn had found no hope for advancement, under whom Korn had been ill-utilized and little-known around the base. Under whom he had festered in obscurity. Although Korn had admired Nevers’s ability to keep the troops contented and compliant, Nevers had had not an aspiration to power nor an ulterior motive in his body. Thus he and Korn could never have been close.

The new group commander reached Korn and smiled down at him, discomfited. He introduced himself: “Charles. Er, Chuck.”

Korn was amused by this artificial and likely calculated show of intimacy, his revealing a first name right off the bat. He replied in kind: “Henry. Blackie, if you like.”

Charles-er-Chuck, trapped by his own vague introduction in the dark as to Korn’s identity and station, struggled for a moment with his billowing coat. “So, ah, you are?”

“Your new deputy commander, Chuck, and air executive officer of the group. Korn is my name.”

“Korn? What kind of a name is that?”

“Oh, Kornish.” The lieutenant colonel cultivated a certain obscurity. He placed an easy hand on the small of the big man’s back and led him toward the base, speaking conversationally. “I’ll show you to your new office at Group Headquarters, but since we’ve a while to walk, why don’t you tell me about yourself, Colonel—why don’t I call you ‘Colonel’ after all, hmn?” He laid it on thick: “I can see that you’re a professional, sir, that you value decorum.”

Cathcart nodded. He was very pale; the bridge of his nose was already beginning to color. Korn marveled. Wherever did they find him? “Well,” Cathcart began. “Well, I was stationed in Telergma with the 18th Group in ‘42, but after we took Pantelleria I was transferred up to France. I was there all last year with the 18th until we re-joined the 27th Air Force; now, well. Here I am!” His voice had dropped an octave into an apparently premeditated and practiced monologue.

“Funny,” Korn remarked. “I was in Telergma, too, with the 225th Group, and I pitched in with Pantelleria. Came up here right afterward; last summer.” Korn in Telergma had been his group’s intelligence officer, a propagandist whose primary responsibility had been to create and distribute pamphlets that would strategically sap the enemy’s morale. They reached the top of a rise, sparsely vegetated, from atop which the entirety of the base was laid out before them. “Welcome to Pianosa, Colonel. I think you’ll find it hospitable.”

Cathcart was younger than Korn had expected, and handsomer, rugged in a manufactured way. Korn considered both of these factors objectively, weighed them in his mind: was Cathcart’s appeal to him a net positive or negative? Would it be a hindrance? He hadn’t accounted for it in advance. Korn observed that the group commander wore no wedding ring, and was taken aback by the internal enthusiasm with which he received this observation.

Korn had fully expected to be promoted to full colonel and group commander after Nevers’s death; at the late colonel’s funeral he had waited for General Dreedle to approach him from behind and to inform him discreetly of his new position. Instead Dreedle had informed him that Wing was importing a ready-made colonel from the 18th Bombardment Group; Korn had been furious, at first, but after he’d calmed down had decided to take the development in stride. Wing couldn’t possibly fail to afford him the same opportunity twice; if—when—Korn eliminated this new replacement, he would certainly ascend to his rightful station. He’d finally have control, mastery over the ambitions of each individual interfering actor on Pianosa, the ability to run the base, alone, like a well-oiled machine, greased with corruption. About the group’s efficacy as a military unit Korn couldn’t care less. He surveyed the base below with fondness. Korn’s own little zoo, his private holding-pen of human suffering.

There were several options open to him as to how to achieve this end. He could work to promote the new colonel to general: at Wing, he’d be out of Korn’s metaphorical hair. Alternately, Korn could adopt a more proactive version of the approach he had taken with Nevers—he hadn’t gotten the chance to try poisoning. Pianosa must be bad luck, his superiors would conclude. Korn’s favorite possibility, however, was his sabotaging the new commander, causing him to be demoted or court-martialed. Leading him backward into rash decisions. It would be so gratifying to humiliate Nevers’s successor: a surrogate revenge. And Korn was drawn to any scheme that would allow him to sit in the center of a spider’s web, pulling minute filaments of fate. He was happiest as a marionettist. So Korn had been hoping either for someone ambitious or someone very gullible. His precise approach would depend on his prospective fall guy.

Korn began to negotiate a narrow footpath, carved into the slope that led down to the basin that held the base. Cathcart followed. “Say, Korn,” he said. “Would, ah, would you happen to know how many bombing missions the men around here are flying?”

“Twenty-five has been the standard in this outfit—your group, now, Colonel.”

Cathcart blinked against the bright Equatorial sun. “Not all that many, wouldn’t you say?”

Any doubts of Korn’s were assuaged. As a rule he didn’t hold with divine providence, but seeing the vapid unfocused ambition in Cathcart’s eyes he knew for certain that the stars had aligned so as to drop a perfect, beautiful buffoon into his lap. His prayers had been answered. Korn smiled warmly. “Your call, sir.”

“Raising the required missions to, say, thirty—you don’t think that might distinguish me from other group commanders?” asked his mark.

“Say, Colonel! I think it just might.”

 

**April 8th, 1944**

He had told Cathcart it’d be a feather in his cap. Or maybe Cathcart had first used the phrase and Korn had picked it up from him. Korn didn’t remember who’d started it. It had been two months since—only two months and he couldn’t remember.

Early morning. Korn’s office and sleeping quarters were one; he occupied a scantily-lit, ill-ventilated shoebox of a room adjacent to Cathcart’s office. A send-up of a monastic cell. On the far end, below a window, was his twin bed, and nearer the door his small desk, upon which sat his typewriter. His typewriter: while the group commander preferred to reproduce his banal thoughts longhand (in shambolic, absurd print—a child’s), Korn for his memoranda favored a Remington Rand. It had been produced by the same company that manufactured the handguns carried by a few men on base: Appleby, Havermeyer. This connection brought Korn joy. A sachet of Smyrna figs sat next to the Remington; the sun from the window was warm on Korn’s right forearm. He’d risen early and dressed before sitting down at the desk to write, threading a new sheet of paper into the typewriter’s carriage. He types:

 

_Colonel,_

_I’m concerned about_

 

Korn hesitates.

 

_a confidential intelligence briefing I’ve received. Confab in your office at 1900 hours?_

 

Fabricating imaginary intel seemed involved, for a flimsy pretense for seducing Cathcart. Is that really his endgame? If it is, Korn fails to see this scenario offering any inroads for it. He tries again:

 

_Colonel,_

_How’s about I join you the next time you take your dinner in your room?_

 

Too transparent, even for Cathcart. Unable to thread the needle this situation had tasked him with threading, Korn, impulsively, comes clean:

 

_Colonel,_

_I meant to be the asp in your bedchamber. And nothing more. Something has gone wrong._

 

Korn withdraws from the keyboard, sits back in his chair. He hadn’t intended to start in on a confessional. Well, so long as Cathcart was never going to read it, what would be the harm in seeing it through to completion?

 

_I thought it’d be easy, Colonel. But coaxing you into joining your inferiors aboard their Mitchells for suspect supply runs has been a bust. You’re an inveterate coward. You haven’t flown more than a single mission—I admire that in you, Colonel. I like to think that you got airborne once and then decided it wasn’t for you._

 

Korn pauses, and then resumes typing:

 

_All I can manage now in the way of sabotage is to suggest periodically that you raise the missions. That’s all I have to show for any of my machinations: thirty missions. I gave you a taste of bourbon from my desk once and now I practically spoonfeed it to you, but I can never bring myself to add in a pinch of anything. The mission-raising: maybe eventually it’ll amount to something, to your promotion or firing, but neither Dreedle nor Peckem seems liable to take notice any time soon. I can no longer deny that it’s anything but an attempt at fooling myself into believing I still intend to do away with you._

 

Korn reads this back to himself and then tears the sheet from the Remington, savagely, crumples it and lays it to rest in the wastebasket at his feet. He tries a different tack:

 

_Colonel,_

_Your chess game is abysmal. It was entertaining for a while to find ways to lose to you, but since I taught you to castle you’ve castled in every game. You expend too many turns at the top of each game freeing your rooks, and you never see my bishops coming. It’s grown monotonous. Oh, I don’t mean it, Colonel. You know I could never really tire of you._

 

Korn withdraws again but doesn’t tear or crumple this page, feeling a modicum of sentimental fondness for it. He leaves it in the Remington’s carriage and stands, walks to the window in the far wall of the room. It was the day before Easter; the movable feast fell this year on the ninth. The services on Sunday were to be conducted late in the day by a chaplain from the mainland, as their own group’s was an Anabaptist and thus abstained from celebrating the holiday. Korn hated that chaplain. Colonel Cathcart was to take an evening of rest and repose in his hill house on the pretense of holding an orgy made all the more illicit by its taking place on Holy Saturday. Of course Cathcart was holding no such thing; he would be alone, behind a stone he had rolled into place himself. In any case, this wasn’t to say a certain seasonal feeling, not at all pious, hadn’t descended upon the base in the days leading up to the Resurrection. In Rome the Romans were, Korn was sure, convulsing in ecstatic ecclesiastic fervor. But out here in the country they were surrounded on all sides by pagan nature: frank, fertile, and unsentimental.

 

_I hope in the spirit of Easter you can pardon me, Colonel. I hope you don’t take my having plotted your demise the wrong way. Jesus was the first sucker, you know, so you were in good company. Hadn't you always wanted friends in high places?_

 

Having returned to his desk, Korn tilts again at a casual, convincing excuse for a private meeting. Lord, but solemnity was difficult.

 

_Colonel,_

_I find your attention to detail in uniform maintenance unsatisfactory._

 

Well, that was rich, coming from him. That this effort—waylaying Cathcart into, what, listening to a confession and responding in kind?—that this effort would succeed seemed irretrievably improbable. Korn abandons it and lapses into parody.

 

_Allow me to shave the trouble spots on your chin, Colonel. Let me iron your uniforms, and polish your medals while they hang on your chest. Care for theatre, Colonel? Look—up on the playbill. Know Edna St. Vincent Millay? Those two plays of hers have the most evocative titles:_ The King's Henchman _,_ The Princess Marries the Page _. Either of those grab you, sir? Would you be amenable to a double feature? Here: a white boutonnière. I’ve box seats; oh, I see you’ve brought your opera glasses. See the lights dim._

_If I had to pin down a birthdate, Colonel, for this hang-up, I’d say it was the first time I saw you in the briefing room, standing at attention beside Danby. Caesar in toga with laurel wreath; beauty pageant contestant in bathing suit with paper sash denoting state of origin. From left shoulder to right hip, upside-down, so it takes a moment to interpret, but, why, Miss New York State, how comely your corn-fed shoulders—bald, bespectacled gentleman judge must remark. Prize cow at State Fair receiving purple ribbon._

_...I disgust myself, sometimes, Colonel. Perversity is a curse._

 

Korn recalls the first few days of Cathcart’s residence at Group headquarters, after the colonel had assumed command. He hadn’t given up easily on his initiative to intimidate Korn; he had snuck allusions to his storied life history into every conversation they’d had. On one occasion, en route to the officers’ club, he’d detailed his college football career:

“I was nearly an All-American,” he’d gloated, one wrist clasped in the other hand behind his back.

Korn had followed, his eyes fixed just below the position of that wrist. “What position’d you play, Colonel?”

“Wide receiver," Cathcart informed him.

“Wide receiver," Korn parroted, in a disbelieving monotone.

"Uh-huh, for a while," Cathcart said. "But then they started me as a tight end."

"Of course.”

 

_But for which team did you play? I have a pretty good idea now, but then I wasn’t sure. Briefing room innuendo sailed clean over your head; your own attempts at blue humor were invariably pale and sickly. Oh, by the way, Colonel, the tomato analogy that I assured you was urbane? I lied. Sorry. Well, yes, so that you’d make a fool of yourself later on by trying it out on someone else, sure. But also because you seemed so vulnerable._

 

Cathcart underwent periodic paroxysms of insecurity, during which, Korn came to know, he required close attention. Like a Greek oracle he was prone to seemingly involuntary, spasmic admissions. In one instance the topic had been his indecision, the indecision that had brought him to this point of self-doubt: “I didn’t vote in the last election,” he’d wailed.

“No?” Korn inquired. Cathcart had his cheek against the surface of his desk, and his hands tented over the back of his own neck, as if anticipating bombs from above. Korn had pulled a chair up to the opposite side of the desk and now reached out to pat Cathcart’s elbow.

A choked sob: “No! I never have—I can never decide between any two candidates, so I don’t vote. But I tell people afterwards that I voted for the winner.”

“Why, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, Colonel. That’s just hedging your bets. Me, I was a Republican when Hoover was in, and then as soon as Roosevelt hired me—story for another time—I was a Dixiecrat. _C'est bon, c'est bon_.”

“That’s French,” Cathcart observed, peeking over his hirsute forearms now.

“Very good, Colonel, very astute. Know what it means?” Cathcart hesitated, so Korn continued. “‘Wunnerful, wunnerful,’ roughly.” There was a diagram like a dichotomous key that Korn followed, mechanically, obediently, when consoling the colonel. Express sympathies. Did that work? If not then sympathize further; indulge him. If so then proceed on to offering reassurances, and then clown a little. The faster Korn could successfully comfort Cathcart, the more Cathcart would come to associate him, subconsciously, with comfort. In his hour of need he’d ring his desk buzzer, Pavlov’s bell, already anticipating Korn’s arrival.

Korn had remembered on his way out the door, after being dismissed, that it was Pavlov who’d rung the bell and the dog that’d drooled in response. He’d tripped and had nearly fallen.

 

_I feel—strictly figuratively, of course, Colonel—I feel Nevers’s ghost breathing down my neck. “Why haven’t you killed_ him _, too?” he asks, disparagingly. He’s very presumptuous, this figurative ghost, very rude. I didn’t kill him, per se, and I probably wouldn’t have killed you. This is how it was going to go: I’d tell you to do it, and then I’d tell them I told you not to do it. But lo, I can’t bring myself to follow through. You’re a joke I never fail to find funny. My eyes roll so hard my eyelashes flutter. I’ll let you stumble and falter, sure, but I always feed you your line, standing a pace behind you in formation. I always save you. So long as your success depends on my being there, I am happy to help you succeed. I was bored before you arrived, Colonel; I have found that this is no longer the case. I walk around the base smiling and frighten the enlisted men._

_The pantomime of romance is nice, at my age. I’ve enjoyed being old and fat with you. It’s nice, the spring air’s nice, I’ve enjoyed listening to you go on about the Easter issue of the_ Saturday Evening Post _, about eggs in vinegar. I like humoring you, Colonel. I like giving you back massages and reassuring you; doing your grunt work, cleaning up your messes. There are days when I feel married and retired out here, with you, in our high tower over the ocean. Other days I feel absurdly young._

 

Korn takes a fig in his mouth and stands again below the window. He loved the sun as only a cold-blooded thing could. It had always been in his interest to stay out of the sun, but he didn’t—just as he didn't deny himself dried fruit, or black burnt toast with rindy orange marmalade, his breakfast of choice. His earthly pleasures: everything sweet and overcooked. And Cathcart, who could be described as neither.

 

_If anything, Colonel, you're undercooked._

 

The object of his affections: Cathcart was a hothouse flower, raised in rigid captivity all his life. Before Harvard, there had been a procession of feeder schools, Choate the last of them, each of which was structured specifically to prepare one for Harvard. Rich, Cathcart was rich. His elitism was acquired. Before boarding school there had been his family's small empire of dairy and beef in rural downstate New York, his father the mayor, his elder brother a flying ace. The Cathcarts had been noble yeoman farmers since they had worn shiny buckles on their hats and shoes. The colonel’s affinity for apple pie Americana was not acquired but engrained; so far as Korn could tell he had lived for the whole of his life within a Norman Rockwell illustration. Cathcart could distinguish fine fabric from cheap, but couldn't tie his own ties—never learned. It was a task now reserved for Korn. Tracing Cathcart’s life history backwards from snatches of casual conversation, Korn saw polished mahogany, monograms, knee-high wool stockings. Dewy fields of cattle. When Korn looked at Cathcart he saw abundance. Purple mountains’ majesty—fruited plains, indeed.

Korn had another dried fig, this one double-lobed. Smyrna figs were sweet because a thousand male wasps had been born and died inside of each of them. Each wasp had hatched and with a misguided altruism had freed a female of his species, chewed her out of her gall, before crawling deeper inside the fig’s syconium to expire. Korn found this romantic, in the abstract, but tried not to think of it now, while eating, for he had actually a weak stomach. Ironic, incongruous with the rest of him. He was aware.

The lieutenant colonel: homely, of middle age, middle height and indeterminate origin. Funny Germanic surname— _ach du_ —no regional accent, the hue of his skin equidistant between the two recognized poles, the two categories that determined one’s placement in a squadron. “Swarthy” is what he was called, usually. Light enough to forestall real scrutiny, but Korn had shaved his head long before the upward advance of his hairline had necessitated it. So long as he remained relatively beardless and thus _passe blanc_ , he could remain in Cathcart’s world, could continue allowing Cathcart to checkmate him on the onyx-and-ivory fold-out board with its set of Napoleonic figurines, Cathcart’s, indefinitely. Or at least for the foreseeable future, and this was all Korn asked. To defend his sessile, helpless king. Tracing Cathcart’s life history backwards, as he had, Korn couldn’t help inserting himself in where he hadn’t been: as Cathcart’s college tutor, or, upon reconsideration of their respective ages, as his professor.

 

_I don’t mean to condescend, Colonel, except that I do, of course. But that isn’t so wrong, is it? To patronize means to dote upon, you know. And you don’t seem to mind my doting. You do seem to mind my Gallicisms, my allusions, and I resent that. I wish you’d think of me as a kindly tutor, Young Master Charles. I’ve had younger men, but something about poaching you, Colonel, only eight years my junior, seems illicit. 3-by-12 to my 4-by-11, or twice 22. I find myself whistling “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” You were 21 when I was nearly 30, 13 when I was 21. Good morning, Colonel._

_Is it love, what I feel for you? I couldn’t say. It certainly isn’t pure. The day anything related to my personage may be described as pure is the day the worms can have me. But I’m devoted, Colonel. Earnestly devoted. I don’t know how I let this happen._

 

Korn is reminded of something, the tail of a doggerel, and fishes in the row of books on his desk for a volume of Gallic poetry. He cradles it in one hand while with his other he reproduces a stanza therewith, smiling, delighted with his own worldliness—having fun now.

 

_If I may substitute you in for a sixteenth century poet:_

> _D’autres sont fols,_
> 
> _de leur marotte,_
> 
> _Moi, je le suis_
> 
> _de mon Cathcart._

_That’s what you’d call a slant rhyme, Colonel._

 

Korn appraises this and then tacks on an addendum:

 

_Too prolix? An acrostic poem for you, Colonel, because I believe I know that your tastes tend toward the pithy and strictly-structured:_

> _**C** ompetent_
> 
> _**A** sset to the group_
> 
> _**T** asteful_
> 
> _**H** ardworking_
> 
> _**C** ourageous_
> 
> _**A** ss that won’t quit_
> 
> _**R** emember yesterday when I reminded you that General Peckem wanted a tight bomb formation for publicity photos? That was actually an analogy for something slightly more oblique, Colonel._
> 
> _**T** he letters preceding that last A were lies. Forgive me my duplicitous ways._

 

Cathcart had been cagey of late. He avoided Korn, addressed him only in a clipped, curt tone, aiming for professionalism—when able he held papers up high in front of his line of sight, as if searching for a watermark, to avoid eye contact with Korn. Korn suspects now that Cathcart has recognized something deviant in Korn’s backrubs (though the colonel had always been assured that these were an old Kornish custom). A week earlier the group had viewed on the base’s open-air projector screen a short informational film about the homosexual threat. This had been General Dreedle's doing, although Dreedle had likely only been following orders from further afield. Anyway, Cathcart had always been suspicious of Korn, but it seemed that this primer on pansyism had given the colonel a concrete charge to latch onto. Maybe he’d finally caught one of the jokes about the two colonels that were perennially popular with those who answered to them. Nothing (nothing corporeal) had ever occurred between them, but that didn’t stop other officers from assuming. This had always pleased Korn.

The night before, the seventh, there had been a dinner and dance at the officers' club. Holding a fête on Good Friday, a fast day, was almost certainly sacrilegious, but Milo had insisted. General Peckem had sent over a six-piece string jazz band to entertain—they were setting up onstage—but no USO hostesses or Italian girls had been imported. Korn knew Peckem to be another of the homosexuals last week’s film had warned the group about, and this, a stag ball, seemed to be his way of striking back against Dreedle. This was another of the two generals' battles, and Pianosa was again their battleground; the base's residents were, all of them, caught in the crossfire. Of course Dreedle didn't know that Peckem had already won this particular fight, that the airmen of Pianosa needed no encouragement in this department.

The low-ceilinged club was oppressively hot and congested, as ever. Korn was standing, leaning against the wall by the bar, when Cathcart approached him:

“Korn? I need you for something.”

So he was needed. “What is it?” Korn noticed that the colonel had a sprig of white oleander tucked into the buttonhole of his breast pocket. How very seasonally appropriate.

Cathcart caught Korn eyeing it: “From Milo,” he explained, almost bashful.

Korn couldn’t resist: “Poisonous, you know.”

“What?”

“Oleander, Colonel. Poisonous. The Greek oracles—never mind. What is it?”

“Well, I’m supposed to speak to a superior officer.” He bit his lip. “But I’m the most superior officer on base.”

“What are you talking about, Colonel?”

They were interrupted by the sextet, which opened its set with a Continental jazz number, instrumental, in the style of Django Reinhardt but more lukewarm than hot. Wintergreen from the mailroom had stepped in to replace an absent (boozing) violinist. Up on the stage with the other musicians, Wintergreen wore a baggy borrowed suit and had flattened his hair to one side with grease. The blunt end of a cigar hung in the corner of his mouth, dropping ashes over the chinrest of his instrument, and this and the overlarge suit lent him the aspect of Puck, or Punch, with the epicaric expression on his face—Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Wintergreen’s technique was poor. Korn hadn’t known that he could play the violin and, all told, still wasn’t convinced. He and the rest of the orchestra looked and sounded not unlike Korn’s mental image of the band that played on as the Titanic sunk; Korn had the disquieting sensation of being present at his own funeral. He was most comfortable occupying Wintergreen’s position, deriving schadenfreudic enjoyment from the obvious suffering of others: _oh, Colonel, what fools these mortals be!_ But here he was, suffering himself, another lover lost in the forest. The double bassist twirled and slapped his upright, large-as-life instrument, plucked it pizzicato.

 

_Jesus, Colonel, would that I could hold you like that man held his bass._

 

The lead singer made her entrance; only after she’d launched into “I’ve Got A Feeling I’m Falling” did Korn realize that she was in drag. He heard Cathcart’s throat catch. Peckem’s plan of attack evidently didn’t end with an absence of women. She was doing it straight, elegant, which Korn appreciated—he was old enough to remember Julian Eltinge fondly. That was one thing you could say about Peckem’s selection of entertainer: she had class. No Carmen Mirandas here. The last time they’d had a Carmen Miranda, Korn had selected a sloe-eyed chorus girl from the line and met her backstage with flowers, invited her back up to Nevers’s office while the late colonel had been away on a mission. Korn had attempted to ply her with drink, but had acted a less-than-gracious host when his guest had revealed that he was interested only in the possibility of being transferred from combat to a full-time musical theatre role in a traveling company. He’d assumed that Korn had an in with Peckem and could make this happen; not so. Korn had thrown him out on his three-inch candied heel. “Show me the ring and I’ll jump right through,” sang the chanteuse from Special Services. _Ach du, und so weiter_.

At the song’s bridge, an instrumental break, she bent over her microphone and asked breathily where the group’s commander might be. Cathcart inhaled audibly. Wintergreen leant over and whispered into her ear, his cigar stub bobbing. She scanned the crowd until she found Cathcart, then made her way down the stairs off to the side of the stage and to his table. She mimed military carriage and saluted. Cathcart stood, automatically, sending his chair skittering off behind him, and saluted in turn. A titter of laughter from the rest of the club. She held out her arms, expecting to dance. Cathcart was paralyzed. There was no true threat posed by taking her up on her offer, so pervasive was the practice of making do—that was all it was acknowledged to be. Korn knew that Dunbar, for instance, kept on with that Yossarian and with the other bombardier they hung around, the one that Korn used to conduct intelligence briefings with. The airmen of Pianosa had an understanding, and their mild ridicule was the due of a union that lent them all immunity. But Cathcart didn't yet grasp this. Cathcart was skittish. He had no idea how to camp.

The singer took the initiative and, after motioning to the band behind her onstage to lengthen the instrumental break, grabbed Cathcart’s hand. Placed it on her waist. “Be a sport,” Korn heard her hiss. She was just doing her job, obviously: this was in her contract for the night. Once the men had their laugh this’d be over with; she could return to the stage, Cathcart to his corner table, and Korn to his seat behind the colonel. Korn felt a twinge of undue jealousy anyway. He had never once demanded sportsmanship from Cathcart. He wouldn’t want Cathcart to start playing fair; what, and all Korn’s work for naught? He made up his mind to cut in: peeled from the wall and rapped on Cathcart’s shoulder with the back of his hand.

“Screw,” he told Cathcart when the colonel turned to him, in a tone never before employed with the word. But the men watching didn’t catch any of the tenderness. They got their laugh: a surprise coup! Korn waggled his eyebrows at Julian Eltinge with stage-lasciviousness and grabbed her waist himself, led her away from the bar so Cathcart’d have a vacuum of attention in which to make his escape. There had been a shocked gratitude in his backward look. Korn didn’t look back to see that he did, as he was busy escorting his partner back to the stage, to delighted jeers, maybe playing up his old horndog schtick but being really very chaste in his dancing. He was loyal, after all, he was taking the fall for Cathcart. He bid Eltinge adieu by kissing the back of her hand, and then simpered and preened a little for the benefit of the crowd. But just as easily he sloughed off his camp, and snarled: “Why don’t you boys follow my example and enjoy the music—unless, that is, you’d rather enjoy K.P. duty tomorrow?” 

The song went unfinished; once the singer had returned to her microphone she didn’t bother with the final verse, just cued the band to start the next number, “I Want to Be Loved By You.” Korn walked back to the bar. Cathcart was nowhere to be found; he had gone. “I couldn’t aspire to anything higher—”

Korn stepped outside and began tracing Cathcart’s path back through the base. He rounded the front of the Group Headquarters building, passing the officers’ mess: from the kitchen came the scents of cooking meat and of cigarette smoke, conmingled, inseparable. Korn yearned for the specific scent of Cathcart’s cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, now. Cathcart had come to him a newly-minted Marlboro man; he had taken up smoking only after entering the service, only after noting that the generals he admired smoked. He was dependent now, though. It was the nicotine, Korn supposed, but he also imagined that followers of a certain Austrian might diagnose the colonel with an acute oral fixation. It was Marlboros first—ivory-tipped, Mild as May, “cigarette of successful men and lovely women”—but he switched his brand frequently, according to whichever had the best advertisements in the _Saturday Evening Post_. Cathcart's attachment to the _Post_ was intimate and disquieting. He kept back issues around the office with spines creased such that, when Korn picked them up, they fell open to full-page or half-page spreads of young men in skintight Jockey underclothes. The only other things Cathcart read were guides to self-improvement; Korn recalled suddenly that lately he had found them open to chapters on quashing effeminacy.

Korn slowed and then broke his stride. So there was his answer, definitive: Cathcart would have him. He would have Cathcart, rather. Cathcart and his office and room in the eaves of the Group Headquarters building, with its yellow light that stayed on late into the night.

 

Holy Saturday, Korn sitting before his typewriter in his little cloister, spoof of a nun’s habitat. Before him on the Remington and scattered around him in heaps on the floor: his _Problemata Henrissae_. Outside: formerly fallow fields now verdant. Warm soil stirring beneath the verdigris with restless ground bees, blind things in their burrows. Cathcart resisted the idea of having anything done for him, until he didn't. Until he broke, and he always broke. Korn had hoped that a written letter would break him this time, but is now half-dispossessed of that notion. Over half. Colonel Nevers laughs from his corner at the variety of scheming Korn has been reduced to, his original ambition displaced. Having exhausted all other options, Korn is inspired to play autobiographer—hopes this will stir something in him, an idea.

 

_Once there was a little boy. He was born not to a dictator's favorite concubine, from whom he may've been able to learn a thing or two, but to a sweet, dumb, devoted Nebraskan undersecretary—hobble skirt, eyeglasses—at the American consulate in Algiers, who happened to have had an ill-advised tryst with a Moroccan national. For this, and the fact that for all her dutiful, longsuffering patriotism she only ever possessed an elementary grasp of French, she was relieved of her position and slunk back to her hometown in the States with her sin [sic]._

_The boy was named “Henry Blackburn” for the diplomat under whom his mother worked and with whom she had been infatuated. She never knew what to make of him, a small dark child who called her "Maman" instead of "Ma." He was called “Blackie,” always, by his mother, who had trouble with her old flame’s first name, but “Heinrich” by everyone else in the corn-hemmed German Belt town in which they lived; schoolchildren were wont to attach a cruel literality to “Blackie.” When said Maman admonished him for lying and he was made to apologize, little nearsighted Henry cottoned on quickly to the fact that he regretted not the lying but the being caught._

_Myopic mother and myopic son moved south to Louisiana. Son thrived in the gay subtropics, under the shade of Baton Rouge’s crape myrtles and live oaks—following boy playmates his own age around to the far side of their trunks, hand-in-hand. He was, hated, still. He had always been hated. He learned to cultivate that resentment in others and to relish it—to thrive on it. Maman took a job as a French teacher. She began consulting school-age Henry on pronunciation, then on grammar, and then he was writing her lesson plans for her. He matriculated at, yes, a state university, Colonel, LSU, l’Old War Skule, majoring in statistics and minoring in geology._

_Worked for a while at an oil company, as a bookkeeper, and then on the side as a bookmaker in smoke-filled back rooms of said oil company, where his nickname was taken in stride. Took bets on horses and dogs, but never placed a bet of his own on any dog or horse. Greatly enjoyed calculating the probabilities of wins, losses and draws. He kept a cool insulating distance from others, always seizing dispassionately upon the option that would best serve his own interests. Made a name as a makeshift property lawyer and all-purpose Francophone with the Army Corps of Engineers, acquiring land out from under poor ignorant Cajun hicks. Later moved East and performed the same service for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Heard that the United States would follow Britain into his dear ancestral North Africa, the Maghreb, and decided that the Air Force could use his administrative expertise; headed South to Miami Beach for Officer Training School. And now he acquires land from poor ignorant Italian hicks for you, Colonel. He is not only a con man but a conjure-man. He has been one all his life._

 

The night before, after the dance: Korn had trotted through the yard of Jeeps, all standing empty and skeletal in silhouette, and found Cathcart outside of the Group Headquarters building, on the landing of the wooden stairs to the back exit. Huge oleander shrubs bloomed on either side of this side door into Group, and Cathcart stood between them now, an unlit cigarette in his teeth. He was patting himself down for a lighter, Korn realized: first his breast pockets, then his hip, desperate. Korn didn’t smoke, but carried a lighter anyway, for Cathcart, for these occasions. Literally carried a torch for Cathcart; Korn smiled ruefully. Big olive-drab moths, in dress uniform too, darted around the sole electric light on this side of the building, around Cathcart’s head, and then back down to the oleander flowers that glowed brilliant white under the moon, that perfumed the still, velvety night air.

“Light, Colonel?”

Cathcart jumped. “Oh, it’s only you, Korn,” he said, and lowered his hands, but didn’t relax any. “Dark out here—a light. Sure.” His hands shook at his sides.

Korn reached the top of the steps and stepped into the circle of buttery incandescent light from the sconce above the door. He leaned up and in to reach Cathcart’s Lucky Strike, still in his mouth—nearer to it, absent its usual long cigarette holder. They were closer than they’d been in weeks for a few seconds, Korn cupping his hand around the lighter’s flame out of habit, even though the night was warm and windless. Cathcart looked up, his eyes baleful crescents, as he allowed Korn to do this, and drew away quickly after it had been done. Took a few short puffs on the cigarette before exhaling through his nose, violently, and still avoiding eye contact.

“Colonel, what happened earlier—”

Cathcart inflated his chest, a familiar piece of posturing. “Don’t worry, Korn. I took the initiative to seek out and read a pamphlet on the subject, and so now I know that these, these urges that I am experiencing are natural in the fighting man—well, not natural, but only situational. Brought about by environmental factors, by our living conditions. Close proximity in sleeping quarters, and the like.”

“You live alone, Colonel,” Korn prodded, gently. “You have your own room.”

Cathcart’s brave front crumpled. His voice was low, choked, tremulous: “I read a pamphlet, Korn.”

“‘Mike and Mac,’ Colonel?”

“That’s ‘Mac and Mike.’ ‘The Story of Mac and Mike.’” He sniffed, near tears. “I found it very informative.”

“I know, Colonel. I know. Shhh.” Korn eased into the prescribed call-and-response coloquy of a well-rehearsed protocol. He squeezed Cathcart’s hand, and Cathcart didn’t protest, didn’t pull away, so Korn held fast to him, and with his other hand stroked the hair of his forearm. Cathcart looked out over the Jeep graveyard, the scrub and the ocean.

“Korn?”

“Sir?"

“Korn, what's the moon made out of?"

Korn the geologist; it had been so long since he had utilized his degree: “Anorthosite and basalt, sir."

“Both?”

“The white parts are anorthosite, and the dark basalt.” Onyx-and-ivory like the cigarette holder, the chessboard.

“And those are, ah, rocks?”

Korn smiled. “Yes.”

Cathcart sniffed again. “Thank you, Korn." He hadn’t asked how Korn knew as much. He had never once asked where the lighter Korn always managed to produce for him came from, nor why Korn carried it.

Korn didn’t relinquish his hand. He looked to the pale oleander flowers, moons in miniature, and then at the real thing. "Want I should fetch it for you, Colonel?”

Cathcart was silent and still for a moment, then wrested his hand away. "That's an old joke, Korn." He took a final pull on his cigarette and flicked the butt off the landing, out of their pool of yellow light, then turned and retreated into the building. Korn heard the wooden stairs to the second story creak under his footfall.

 

_Colonel,_

_I’m trying to help you. That poem from earlier—the first one. Of course you haven’t seen either, but I’m not really talking to you. Thought exercise, Colonel; like a war game, or solitaire. Anyway,_ c’etait un blason. _Literature lesson: Herr Doktor Korn points pool cue to chalkboard. From_ blazon, _“to emblazon.” I’m loyal, Colonel, well and truly, against my own better judgment._ Les blasons _were paeans of blame or praise. I realize now that I’ve written quite a few of them this morning. I meant to blame you. I came to bury you, Colonel, not to praise you. But now see me hoist your flag, your coat of arms. Its bend sinister, its indistinct crown of thorns or leaves. Oleander is so often mistaken for bay laurel, Colonel. And vice versa._

_Those fig wasps can’t stop themselves. They know not what they do. And that’s what I like about you, Colonel. ‘I don’t give a damn about the men or the airplane,’ you said, and I know you don’t. I’m conscientiously evil, but to you it’s second nature—you can’t help it. We’re two of a kind. I walk along the beach and pick sea-snakes from the surf, force-feed them their own tails, and fling them back into the foam to drown or to swim in rings forever. I’m fate’s arbiter; I tie it in knots. I create self-perpetuating reactions, exergonic logical loops. But now I find myself caught. You and I caught in a loop, Colonel: like a bird touched too early by man and ruined for all other birds, like a mistrained cur, you can no longer make do without me. You big spiteful animal. Me, I wouldn't want to go without you. You've raised me again; you’re caught in my trap, I in yours._

 

After writing this, Korn stands and stretches, having been seated for hours: the angle of the sun through his one window informs him that it is almost noon. He looks back at the page still in the carriage of his Remington Rand and tears it out, trashes it. Not today. Perhaps not ever. Korn feels a dull, unidentifiable ache in his side. If he were more readily given to dramatics, Korn would say that he felt like crawling up into a fig and dying. He is about to decamp to the officers' mess downstairs when his door, of its own accord, opens a crack. Cathcart peers in, Cyclopean. “Korn?”

Korn has to laugh. “Heard of knocking, Colonel?”

“Yes,” Cathcart asserts, gravely, and opens the door a little further, enough to stick his head in. Korn can tell by the set of his chin that he’s inches from giving in and begging Korn to take responsibility. Korn wants nothing more than to take responsibility on the spot, but his depraved bravado on paper is of no help here. Neither of them folds.

“Well, what can I do for you?” Korn asks, aiming for nonchalance though the colonel’s entrance has set off a metronome hidden somewhere in his room—within his chest. In North Africa he had met a French author who’d read his squadron a portion of his latest children’s book, a fable featuring a Little Prince and a tame fox: _If you come at just any time,_ the fox had said, _I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you. One must observe the proper rites._

“Nothing. I just wanted to let you know that I’m heading out for the farm now, and to remind you that I’ll be back in time for Easter services tomorrow. Those’ll be around noon, right?”

Korn continues to feign detached disinterest. “Yes.”

Cathcart remains in the doorframe of Korn’s narrow office. “Well, have a nice break.”

“I’m not taking one, Colonel,” Korn says without looking up. He licks the nib of a pen, and addresses the front of an envelope. “You’re the only one going away.”

Cathcart coughs, and Korn does look up to see the colonel rub the toe of his shoe on the back of his other calf. “Well, have a nice, a nice span of time, then. Have a nice two days.” He withdraws, reluctantly, and shuts the door behind him.

Korn turns back to his typewriter—ivory-keyed, he notices now. He cracks his knuckles, fires off a terse memorandum, seals it in the envelope already addressed to Cathcart, and takes it out into the hallway to find Milo. Milo who’d wedge it into the windshield of the colonel’s Jeep, or into its trunk, before he departed.

A few hours later, after handing the duty of the end-of-week executive report for Wing over to Captain Black (who hated preparing said report but would resent Korn more if he pawned the task off on Major Major instead), Korn would be in a Jeep flying over the chaparral of Pianosa’s hinterland, green now. In the back seat, a covered basket from Milo with which to woo his mignonne. The smell of it, roast chicken and fresh bread, would catch up with the car’s driver only when he stopped to allow sheep, absent a shepherd, to cross. His gloved hand would remain on the Jeep’s horn for the duration of his holdup, but he’d be more amused than exasperated. More maquis, or macchia: youngest sedge, a neotonic yellow-green. Clusters of blue gentian and pink campion flowers would flash past at long intervals. Shrubbage: larches and rhododendrons would emerge as he climbed higher into the island’s hilly interior. A row of cyprusses before he’d turn into the long unpaved drive of Cathcart’s home-away-from-Headquarters. To Cathcart’s bed. And the missions would keep mounting behind them, body after body after body piled in a tower: a monument to their love, a testament.

 

Buona Pasqua _, Colonel. Expect a visitor._

_H.K._

 

**Late June, 1944**

Two months later, in a dream, Korn remembers Pantelleria. The diminutive Italian isle’s name evoked a fantasy kingdom, but Korn had only seen it after it had been razed to the ground in Operation Corkscrew. In June of 1943, days after Pantelleria’s taking, his group and others in the Twenty-Seventh Air Force had converged on it in heady anticipation of the Northward push up into Italy that was to come, the whole Mediterranean laid out before them like a cornucopia.

A few American officers, Korn among them, had attended a flag-raising on a low, scorched hill. Then, giddy conquerors, they had descended upon a bombed-out village in search of alcohol. They’d found a rack of Pantellerian wine miraculously intact in a villa, and so the group of them had gathered to stand around in its half-levelled courtyard. The first bottle that they unearthed ended up with a tall, broad major, who cradled it awkwardly, at a loss as to how he should open it—absent, ironically, a corkscrew. Korn, watching the major from across the courtyard, amused, met his gaze and, discreetly, trying to help, mimed smashing the neck of the bottle against the low stone wall that bordered the courtyard. The major’s eyes—a very pale blue, as if adapted to constant shade—lit up, and he grabbed the bottle by its neck and brought it down, enthusiastically, over the top of the waist-high wall, shattering its body, wasting the entirety of the wine. The major stared dumbly at the disembodied glass flute in his fist for a moment and then looked back up at Korn, eyebrows accusatory and mouth in an o, betrayed. There was a moment of silence, one guffaw from another officer, and then a gale of laughter from the group. The major, infuriated, looked prepared to lay into Korn, before he took in the silver oak leaf cluster on Korn’s collar and realized that he was outranked. Korn grinned, saluted jauntily with two fingers; the younger officer flushed an ornery terra-cotta. “Care to christen that wall, Major?” Korn had called, provoking more laughter, in which the humiliated major’s reply had been drowned. Lost to the ages.

Cathcart didn’t seem to remember their true first meeting; Korn hadn’t, until now. After the christening, Korn had sat in the passenger seat of a Jeep, the motor running while a few inferior officers vied for seats in the back. The sun had been setting, the dry brush around them dyed red and black. The major from earlier, Cathcart, jogged up to Korn's side of the car, affecting penitence. Mining for status: “Sir, before you leave, I just wanted to apologize for my behavior earlier. If there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all that would make up for it—”

Korn laughed. Here was a devotee of the spoils system, hoping to get into his good graces, ride his coattails. Knowing that he would be speeding away in a moment and would never have to deal with this brown-nosing ingenue again, Korn dispensed with cordiality. As he had with the chorus girl, with the same words: “Won’t work on me, son. I won't lift a finger for you.” Cathcart had been startled. “I don’t do anything for anyone,” Korn reiterated. The officer in the driver’s seat put the pedal to the floor and Korn held his hat in place as they roared away, leaving Cathcart behind in a plume of dust and ash.

It had been only a year, not even a year yet, but Cathcart then had been substantially thinner and, Korn would venture, less grey, though it seemed improbable. Only a year. The Pantellerian smokeplume rises and solidifies into ropy strands of candyfloss, marionette strings, and then into Cathcart's white bedsheets between their legs, entangled. Conmingled. The two of them bedded in the farmhouse. The middle of the night, or predawn. So Korn had been dream-remembering: _déjà rêvé_ backwards. A closer look at Korn’s recent past and there he was, there was Cathcart. _Ecce Homo_. Korn was justified by this recollection in his feeling that Cathcart had been with him not only for the past few months but always.

"Korn," Cathcart hisses, poking him in the back. Something has occurred to him: "Are you evil?" Realizing belatedly that his grand vizier, his kingmaker, has designs on the throne.

As in the Jeep, on Pantelleria, he is inclined toward honesty. "And how."

"Shut up! 'And how!' What's that supposed to mean?"

Korn rolls over to face him and displays the whites of his eyes. "If you were to examine my soul I imagine it'd look much like what you'd find under a manhole cover."

Cathcart snorts dismissively. He wriggles closer and rubs the cold soles of his feet on Korn’s calves; sighs, relieved and contented, and Korn feels it against his neck: “Blackie.” In Cathcart’s mouth it is innocent, a child’s name for a horse, a dog. “You’re ridiculous. You know, I was almost actually worried for a second.” 

Korn is almost offended by Cathcart’s willful refusal to see him for what he is. Almost. In lieu of correcting the colonel he opts to say nothing, to allow Cathcart to nestle in against him.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an overhauled version of a fic I wrote in spring of 2016—actually, on Easter Sunday of 2016, in Morris Arboretum (outside of Philadelphia, PA), hence all the flowers. Generally I am uninterested in getting-together fic, but I felt compelled to lay out my vision of how Cathcart and Korn could conceivably, er, get together. I also usually object to imbuing fanwork with a whole lot of one’s personal ideas about character backstories, but I did that here, too! Oops. Anyway, the present incarnation of this fic came to be through my reading several books: Allan Bérubé’s _Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in WWII_ , which was indispensable, and Douglas Hofstadter’s _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ , which was, I don’t know, a lot of fun. That and Nabokov’s _Lolita_ are to blame for Korn’s French pretension in this story, though I do think it’s true to his character in _Catch-22_. _C’est la guerre_. Ian McEwan’s _Atonement_ was what prompted me to try my hand at writing this to begin with, back in 2016; no clue exactly why. Something about typewriters and love letters. Kiki Petrosino’s poem “Witch Wife” (which is a response to an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem of the same name) was my guiding light throughout, insomuch as being a perfect encapsulation of what it is to be an evil henchman in love:
>
>> _I’ll conjure the perfect Easter_
>> 
>> _& we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—_
>> 
>> _my pink gloves & your green gloves_
>> 
>> _like parrots from an opera over the earth—_
>> 
>> _We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths._
>> 
>> _I’ll conjure the perfect Easter..._
> 
> Even more notes:
> 
>   * On war history: Joseph Heller served in the 448th Bombardment Squadron of the 340th Bombardment Group, based in Corsica, which was in turn a part of the 12th Air Force. In _Catch-22_ , these were fictionalized as the 256th Bombardment Squadron of an unknown group, based in Pianosa and belonging to the 27th Air Force. Thus within the canon of _Catch-22_ , the 12th Air Force is represented by the 27th Air Force. If both Cathcart and Korn had been members of the 27th Air Force earlier in the war, they both logically would’ve served in North Africa, as that was where the bulk of US air forces operated out of prior to mid-1943, when strategic targets around Italy (like Pantelleria!) were taken and the Allies became able to push farther North into the Mediterranean Theatre. I fictionalized the 321st Bombardment Group, in which I decided Korn would have served, as the 225th (in keeping with _Catch-22_ ’s use of square numbers), and Cathcart’s former group, the 17th, as the 18th. In real life, the 17th and 321st groups collaborated on the bombing of Pantelleria; thus in my story did the 18th and 225th. Afterward, Cathcart was transferred to southern France, while Korn was placed under Nevers on Pianosa (Corsica).
>   * On “Gallic poetry”: The poem that Korn reproduces is an ode by medieval French bard Charleval to medieval French poet Clement Marot. I encountered it in Douglas Hofstadter’s _Le Ton Beau de Marot_. Hofstadter’s translation runs as follows: “Some others have pets / About which they crow / But me, I go wild / About my Marot.” A Cathcart ‘n’ Korn version of my own devising: “The mess hall boy has / Always wanted a mart / But me, I’m kept busy / By my dear Cathcart.”
>   * On “Mack and Mike”: “The Story of Mack and Mike” was a WWII-era informational pamphlet that I found reproduced in Allan Bérubé’s _Coming Out Under Fire_. It’s very obviously a (euphemism-veiled) instruction manual for soldiers experiencing gay desire.
>   * On heraldry: a “bend sinister” on a coat of arms is a diagonal bar that runs from top left to bottom right; bends sinister signify illegitimacy. _Bend Sinister_ is a very homoerotic Nabokov novel about autocracy.
>   * On Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The “French author” that Korn refers to served in 1943 with the Free French Air Forces in North Africa, interacted with USAAF personnel, and was known during the war to carry a copy of _The Little Prince_ and read passages from it to others. I found the possibility of Korn having met Saint-Exupéry and related to his Fox irresistible. Saint-Exupéry disappeared in July 1944, a couple of months after this story takes place, after flying out of Corsica (Pianosa).
>   * On his trip to Cathcart’s farmhouse, Korn sees blue gentian flowers, which are processed to make the dye that Gus and Wes apply to peoples’ gums. I think that’s everything?
> 



End file.
